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Hollerith, Herman
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Hollerith, Herman (1860–1929)

US inventor of a mechanical tabulating machine, the first device for high-volume data processing. Hollerith's tabulator was widely publicized after being successfully used in the 1890 census. The firm he established, the Tabulating Machine Company, was later one of the founding companies of IBM.

Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, and attended the Columbia University School of Mines. From 1884 to 1896 he worked for the US Patent Office.

Working on the 1880 US census, he saw the need for an automated recording process for data, and had the idea of punching holes in cards or rolls of paper. By 1889 he had developed machines for recording, counting, and collating census data. The system was used in 1891 for censuses in several countries, and was soon adapted to the needs of government departments and businesses that handled large quantities of data.



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It all began with Herman Hollerith and his punched card, which was the main user interface to computers for the first few decades that computers existed.
From the punched card to the Web: data visualization is a viable ... by Bray, Tim / Information Management Journal
The author's brief summation of the march of computing history includes Charles Babbage, the 19th-century astronomer and economist who sought to automate mathematics, just as the machines of the Industrial Age were converting factories to mass production; Herman Hollerith, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who built a punch-card tabulator for the national census in 1890; and Vannevar Bush, also of M.
ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Lohr, Steve / Washington Monthly
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